Salmon returned annually despite the lost fires, honoring a covenant people had abandoned

Evidence

From the sea the wild salmon watched for the blaze on the headland and saw nothing for years. But they have a covenant with the People and a promise to Skunk Cabbage to care for them, and so they came, but fewer and fewer every time. The ones that made it though came home to an empty house, dark and lonely. There were no songs or fern-decked tables. No light on the shore to say welcome back. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 894

Categorization

• XREF: Only-chapter narrative voice gives the fish interiority and covenant duty, extending Indigenous-science mutualism framing so the more-than-human is a grieving partner. — connects to: Ceremony reciprocates the gift of salmon lives rather than serving human benefit — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 926
• STORYSTEM: The image of wild salmon still coming to a dark, empty shore could seed a fiction about the persistence of nonhuman fidelity after its human counterpart is gone.

Broader Connections

• Ceremony reciprocates the gift of salmon lives rather than serving human benefit #expands (0.82) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 926